If it Loots, it Leads: Stereotyping the Police Shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson
For these acts and images to do more than express the release of anger over one more senseless killing is still another textbook example of America's racial and class polarization.
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That Sleazy Obama – Sebelius White House Correspondents Dinner Photo
Evoking the stereotype of the hyper-sexual black man and the penchant for white women, it's still one more photo of the first black president with racist overtones.
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Hash Tag Mining: NBA Clippers vs. Owner Donald Sterling
It's black because that's the issue.
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Martin Luther King: The Happy Negro
On this MLK day, I'm thinking about how much America likes to airbrush its historic figures.
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The Quenelle Salute and the Urge to be Outraged
If the Quenelle has no meaning, it's significant for the (media) madness itself.
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Alongside the Grace and Poetry of the Mandela Memorial Tribute, a Mirror of Our Lesser Selves
If a profound delineation would have ever emerged between tabloid culture and our highest nature, yesterday would have been that day.
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The Politics of Nostalgia: The Mandela Fist
It's interesting how the flood of memorial portraits in the West marginalize or soft-peddle, but also get stuck on Mandela's ferocity and engagement with the tool of violence.
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Racism as Style: The Return of Blackface
It's becoming increasingly difficult for me to overlook the tremendously casual manner in which fashion photographs repeat the ghoulish visual history of racism as style.
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Alex Garcia's "Inner City" Photos from Austin: The Pictures That Cannot Be Seen
Where the "impossibility" lies is in the steep challenge of looking at these photos naïvely enough to consider each individual as distinct from the associations they invariably stimulate.
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The Kidnapped White Girl Photo to Top Kidnapped White Girl Photos?
I wish it was the Onion, but it's not.
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Is USPS 50th Anniversary March on Washington Stamp Based on Steve Schapiro's Jackie Robinson Photo? and What Would That Mean?
In this day and age in which events are so thoroughly produced and packaged, how strange to consider that the iconic figure wouldn't be identified and co-branded with that event, that a person's celebrity wouldn't be utilized to transfer their personal shine to the event in question.
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In the Reflecting Pool: The March on Washington and the Diminishing Space for Public Protest
Looking at the photos from this weekend's 2013 anniversary, the visual and physical shift in the civic and expressive relationship to democratic space is shocking to me.
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The Civil Rights Movement and the Stamp of '63
A major narrative surrounding the story involves the challenge, for the civil rights movement and the media, to make this week more than just a commemoration and an exercise in nostalgia. Considering this widely-circulated image of an event at the Newseum on Friday, that might be a tall order.
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Looking for the White Trayvon Martin
If the reverse-race version has proven its illustrative value beyond Zimmerman's trial, what, exactly, does the illustration have to offer the right?
Continue ReadingSlamming Detroit
Is Detroit a city in a lot of trouble? Of course it is. But to the extent the bankruptcy is also a wake-up call, the Reuters slideshow is a derisive post-mortem as well as a subtle expression of racism.
Continue ReadingAfter the Zimmerman Trial: Hoodie Comes into its Own as Cultural Symbol
Since Trayvon Martin's death, the article of clothing has come to represent the stereotyping of young black males. This week, it also became the envelope and container by which to express the sense of bias and omission of race from the Zimmerman trial and acquittal.
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